


Hanami (Renewal and Observation)

by tomioneer



Category: Naruto
Genre: Amputee Shikamaru, Established Relationship, F/M, Major Character Death is Off Screen but discussed extensively, Naruto Epilogue What Epilogue, Naruto Shippuden: The Lost Tower, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, ShikaSaku Hanami 2019, Time Travel, also not finished yet but I’m posting it! I’m still working on it!, and I made up a Big Bad Foreign Enemy, diverges when Sasuke leaves Konoha after the Fourth War, if I spent half as much time writing as I did creating the timeline..., more on both of these subjects later, sorry it’s late ya’ll
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 08:43:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18312182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomioneer/pseuds/tomioneer
Summary: The last Hidden Village will fall in seven months.But Kakashi gave Shikamaru two scrolls, and one of them was a mission. So Shikamaru has worked out his answer. What to do, where to go, and how to survive? Change the events that lead to this, go to the past, gather a small, elite team of intellectual powerhouses with eidetic memories and give them the authority to guide the world down a path that will allow them to be prepared when the attack comes.Better yet, they could avoid it altogether.





	Hanami (Renewal and Observation)

**Author's Note:**

> My first ShikaSaku had to be a big one, I guess. And it's time travel, bc I'm weak for that shit.
> 
> Ironically, I started writing this right before I found out about ShikaSaku Hanami 2019. I decided it was fate, ish. While I tried to get it done in time, that was clearly not meant to be. Thanks, work. Thanks, ADHD. 
> 
> More importantly, a big Thank You to Mako-san for your messages of support--I cried a little!--and to Danitini, who was kind enough to beta this first chapter while I fretted. 
> 
> Here's chapter one! I'll link it from tumblr, too. I'm probably going to post a playlist for this on 8tracks.
> 
> I swear to god, I'm finishing this one.
> 
>  
> 
> Language notes:
> 
> Terms and phrases common to the Naruto fandom have been left in Japanese, such as Jutsu, Byakugou, Konoha- and Kumogakure, etc. You know the drill. I am translating the names of jutsu, so forgive any clunkiness.
> 
> I'm borrowing the time travel method from the semi-anime-canon movie The Lost Tower, and using the English Dub terms Ley Line rather than Ryūmyaku for my own convenience; I watched it in the dub first so that's always how I think of them, and I caught too many instances where I confused the terms so I just. made the choice. XP
> 
> The two taps Sakura and Shikamaru give each other at times is meant to be one for each syllable of 'suki', a Japanese word for like/love.

Nara Shikamaru has been on dangerous missions before. He’s changed the face of the world before, commanded armies with a few seconds of thought and to-the-point words. Lying to heads of government, leaving friends to die, even choking the life out of his enemies with his bare hands, are all things he’s become accustomed to since becoming a Jounin. More accurately, since the First Intercontinental War began.  

He isn’t scared because it’s _dangerous_.

Looking across the array of seals at Sakura, Sealing up her books and notes in a scroll, pink hair in a messy tail, and his breath catches. He is afraid, terrified even, because what they’re planning is based almost entirely on the long-lost mystical power structure of a dead city, his wife’s memories from _ten years ago_ , and the much, _much_ older notes left behind by the Fourth Hokage recording his experiences with time-travel and the reversal thereof.

This could save them, yes. But far more likely, they will die trying to unleash what power remains in this empty, half-destroyed chamber deep beneath Wind Country’s broken city of Loran. And yet it’s the best chance the Shinobi Union has.

“I think we have everything ready,” Sakura murmurs to herself. Tucking her scroll into the pouch on her belt.

Shikamaru sighs, elbow leaning on his knee and face in his hand. Voice even, not betraying the knot of nerves in his gut, he drums up half a smile for her. “You said that an hour ago, dear.” Then she’d pulled the scroll back out and summoned out her books again. At this rate, she’s not going to have the chakra they need to release the Fourth Hokage’s Jutsu.

Glancing up, she frowns at him mightily. “I’ve triple-checked the formula modifications we made to control the date of our arrival. I’ve re-reviewed the significant and related dates. The physical decline of Loran began thirty years ago when an unidentified creature rampaged through the city _while_ the Fourth Hokage and Kakashi-sensei were there on a mission. Just a few years later Sunagakure occupied the city during the Third Shinobi World War, causing the Queen to take her people and leave Loran."

Shikamaru nods. If going over the facts will help Sakura feel more at ease, he’s more than willing to do so. “We know they became a nomadic tribe wandering the deserts of the Land of Wind. Her decision is credited as the only reason so many of Loran’s people survived the War instead of dying in the crossfire between the Hidden Villages, and they only joined Sunagakure after the Fourth Shinobi World War nine years ago.”

Biting her lip, Sakura looks back at the old, dried ink on the floor, the characters so uniformly written it can only have been done via jutsu. “Since then the Ley Lines should only have been disturbed once, when Mukade absorbed the Fourth’s sealing array during my team’s mission here ten years ago.”

He reaches across the center of the array, where the Fourth Hokage’s Hiraishin kunai is embedded in a stone carving in the floor, and wiggles his fingers at her. “There’s more than enough power to take us back to when we need to go.”

“We’ll be going a lot farther than Naruto did, even if it is technically more recent. The time difference is substantial...” Sakura stretches out her arm and locks their fingers together, both palms down, fingertips fitting in the space between each other’s knuckles. Her hands are hard, callused from fighting and saving lives equally. He’s got his own calluses too, from pens and brushes and Asuma’s trench knives. Sakura earned hers by punching until she bled, from kunai, scalpels, and surgically precise needlework. He wishes he could have fought beside her all the way to this moment, but they each have their own responsibilities.

He shakes his head. “We’ll be alright. We have to do this.”

Lifting her head, Sakura looks at him, brow furrowed, eyes bright with concern. “We’ll never be able to come back. Even if it’s possible, the plan is to destroy the timeline as we know it.”

Shikamaru says nothing to that, because there is nothing to say. No, they won’t be able to come back here, to this time, _their_ time. But that was the whole point of doing this: there is _nothing left to come back to_. Even as they speak, the last of the Shinobi Union is making a stand against soldiers and magicians of the Intercontinental Coalition. They’re using a plan Shikamaru drew up not to assure victory but to guarantee a drawn-out battle that would span the eastern half of the elemental nations and keep the enemy out of what remains of Wind Country. It’s a masterpiece of evasive tactics and precise, hard-hitting strikes the likes of which has never been attempted before, because the Union has never before been willing to sacrifice swaths of their men in the name of delaying the foreign military’s advance.

The Hidden Villages are gone, burned out, collapsed, or worse. Only Sunagakure still physically stands, walls for what few civilians still live to hide behind. The ocean around Kirigakure had risen one summer day with next to no warning and overtaken the entire Village with a massive wave, costing thousands of lives, civilian and shinobi alike. There were almost no survivors among those who present. The Mizukage himself had been among the casualties, and leadership of the Kiri forces had defaulted back to Terumi Mei, who had been fighting with some of the other ex-Kage on the northeastern front. That had been just over four years ago.

Iwagakure fell next, a year to the _day_ after the Kiri Flood. More than half of those in residence at the time, including Sasuke and Kurotsuchi, had died in what could only be described as a tremendous and targeted earthquake, somehow contained to the region surrounding the Village. And then, just a year and a half ago now, Konoha had been set aflame. The Village Hidden in the Leaves was made almost entirely of wood. Fields, houses, forests, and people alike were reduced to little more than ash.

Shikamaru had been there that awful night. Four months into shadowing Kakashi to learn everything he would need to know as the Seventh Hokage, Kakashi had been summoned back to the Village. Officially they returned home to evaluate the next round of Shinobi up for promotions. In reality, Kakashi and each of the other Kage with Villages left to return to had done so in the hopes of averting whatever fiasco was bound to occur that August.

No one knew who the next target would be. What few spies they’d been able to slip into the enemy troops were only able to confirm the Coalition’s intentions to attack one of the remaining Hidden Villages. None of them expected anything as underhanded as what occurred: not _just_ a fire, but a barrier erected around the Village. Suddenly, they understood how the sea level rose around Kirigakure, how the earthquakes had left no damage farther away than half a kilometer. No one had been able to get in or out of Konoha from ten at night when the barrier went up to just before dawn the next day. Being trapped in a blazing hell for seven hours wasn’t something anyone, even a shinobi, even a _Kage_ , could shake off.

The stench of cooking meat makes him sick now. Nightmares distorting his memory of the greenery burning throughout the village, the way it lit up the night sky, are common to him. At those times Shikamaru wakes sweating, chest heaving and throat burning as he remembers how the smoke suffocated him. The crackling of the fire _almost_ drowned out the screams of his people burning in their homes. Even now, he sometimes finds it hard to use Katon, let alone the Art of Ash Pile Burning he has long favored.

The fire was unnatural. It ate away at every building Tenzo had erected during the rebuilding after Pain’s Invasion, fueled by the chakra left in the wood and burning all the hotter for it. The barrier was not any recognizable jutsu, and taken together with the date these facts meant this could only be enemy action, as the deliberate destruction of the other villages by their own elements had been. Barrier and flames alike were certainly the work of the Coalition’s Offensive Magic Division, who use a different form of jutsu.

There was almost nothing Kakashi could do, and watching him recognize that had been its own kind of hell. Without Obito’s Sharingan he didn’t have the power to transport people to the Kamui dimension. Even if the Hokage had a way to get them back out or the stamina to do it frequently enough to save everyone he came across. Shinobi and citizens had been directed to gather at the most fireproof training grounds instead of the usual evacuation paths; heading into tunnels that could fill with smoke was a good way to get people killed. It was fortunate, then, that so many shinobi training grounds and civilians parks had rivers and lakes to practice water-walking and Suiton, to fish in during the summer. There were open fields, too, for the practice of the most destructive jutsu. Good places to gather, away from the tree lines and residential or business areas that burned so fast.

Genma, Iwashi, and Raido had returned with Kakashi and Shikamaru, always on guard duty in those days, always dogging the Hokage’s steps during war time. They had continued to do their jobs, above and beyond the demand of their position. They followed Kakashi and Shikamaru around as they moved through the Village, all of them trying to save as many as they could, ushering them to the safest places they could find. A system was set up: one or two of the rare Suiton users in Konoha were stationed at each gathering point, and they taught everyone who could mold chakra effectively to help keep the fires at bay. It worked, for a while, to keep those who had escaped as safe from the fires as possible.

For those who had not initially escaped, or been quickly found, there was little hope. Almost no one in the Village had sufficient training in medical jutsu to efficiently counter the terrible third degree burns, broken limbs, and other ailments many people experienced. Surgeons, doctors, and nurses from the hospital and scattered clinics all did their best, but without medical jutsu or access to the proper equipment, let alone the time to treat everyone who needed it, more lives were lost by the hour.

Maybe it would have been different had Sakura not been stationed at the Central Camp as Konoha’s representative while Kakashi was gone. Perhaps if Shizune were Director of Konoha Hospital instead of Medical Division Commander, or Shī from Kumo wasn’t leading the medics working on the front lines, or Kabuto hadn’t gone to ground with as many war orphans as he could to protect the next generation, it would have gone better. But they _were_ , they _had_ , and with Tsunade’s recent death weighing heavily on all of them, every one of the Union’s best-trained medics was serving either on the front or at the Medical Division’s Base.

Civilians and shinobi alike were succumbing to the heat, to smoke inhalation, to shock from their burns, long before anyone but Shikamaru and Kakashi realized the barrier was airtight. The smoke of an entire city burning had nowhere to go, and as the night progressed it grew harder and harder to breathe, until the air was black and thick and choking. Fuuton users did their best to direct the smoke away from the crowds, and Kakashi had given up searching for survivors in favor of teaching runners every Wind and Water Release jutsu he knew, sending them around the Village to spread the techniques and strategies. It was all they could think of to do, Kakashi and Shikamaru and the three men guarding them.

But Kakashi, at one point, had stopped moving. Mask soaked with sweat, skin grey with ash, shoulders heaving with every labored breath and sleeves burned away up to his elbows, he looked up through the smoke. It seemed to part and shift aside, leaving, for the briefest second, a clear view of the Memorial Stone. His jaw clenched. He closed his eyes, then shook his head and laughed for a good solid minute, hands on his hips, voice cracking and dry.

Reaching up, he hooked a finger in his mask and pulled it down. Kakashi set a hand on Shikamaru’s shoulder and smiled at him, eyes crinkling. He had dimples. Shikamaru had never seen his face before. “I can do it,” he said firmly, words scraping out of his throat, “because I _love_ my home, and the people here. That’s all it takes to be Hokage, even if you never wanted to.”

He handed Shikamaru two scrolls, pulled from the pouch behind him. One of them was familiar, a standard mission scroll. The other was thick, heavy, and even exhausted as his reserves were Shikamaru could sense the hum of chakra within--it had been Sealed. Before he could make sense of what Kakashi had said, connect his words to a long-ago promise, or even draw breath to ask about the meaning of the scrolls, the Sixth Hokage looked past him, at Genma, Iwashi, and Raido, and said, “Serve him well.”

The Hokage Guard Platoon--some of Kakashi’s best friends, Shikamaru knows--bowed, fists pressed to their hearts. Raido was visibly biting back words, and Iwashi looked near tears, but Genma’s whole face had gone cold. Kakashi smiled at them, adjusted his hitai-ate, then pulled his mask back up and ran off the field, straight into the fires.

No one had seen him after that. His body hadn’t been found, when the fires finally died a few days later and the survivors began picking through the wreckage of Konohagakure. But not even ten minutes after Kakashi ran into the flames, the shining red barriers keeping citizens trapped and suffocating had pulsed. They flickered purple, then shattered with a crash that sounded like nothing more than a huge bolt of lightning striking one of the village’s great trees.

When they made it out, the citizens of Konoha found a kilometer and a half of forest around the Village destroyed. Trees had been shattered, burned up, and the ground had scorch marks even where the blast shouldn’t have reached. There was evidence of the lighting strikes having hit considerably farther than that--but the barrier was gone, and storm clouds gathered overhead even as the smoke billowed upwards. They’d been able to evacuate the remaining survivors because of what Kakashi did.

When dawn came that morning, barely discernible through the darkened sky, those few hundred shinobi and civilians who survived the night turned to Shikamaru. There were questions in their eyes and they looked like a crowd of ghosts--the lost, the alone, the homeless. Terrified and injured and traumatized and furious, all with ash grey faces and violent burns of various degrees from trying to save as many and as much as they could. Their very lives were in their hands, everything they owned now on their backs. In all of Shikamaru’s memories, Konoha as a whole had never looked so united in intention, in thought, as they were when they looked to their new Hokage and asked him what to do, where to go, and how to survive.

Shikamaru didn't have an answer, then. His mind had been numb with horror, with grief, with the hollow realization that it didn't matter what preventative measures a village took, there was nothing they could do to stop their destruction. Kakashi had died in the attack, just like Kurotsuchi a year before and Choujuurou the year before that. And he'd been _right_ ;  Kumo fell a year later, collapsing in on itself in a massive landslide.

Nearly every citizen and shinobi survived. They had been evacuated on his order, but since then Kumogakure shinobi have been dying in droves. They are being _targeted_ on battlefields, attacked with extreme prejudice. The Raikage, Darui, was assassinated by an undercover agent _eighteen days_ after the landslide, even though it meant sacrificing such a valuable operative. An enemy general made the choice to kill a Kumo Chunin over the _Kazekage_ , for all the good it did them with Gaara there to stop them. Their numbers are _dwindling_. Their civilian camps are being raided. It’s been five months and nearly as many Kumo citizens have died as would have if they’d been caught in the landslide.

Sunagakure is next and there is nothing the living Kage can do to stop it. The last Hidden Village will fall in seven months.

But Kakashi gave Shikamaru two scrolls, and one of them was a mission. So Shikamaru has worked out his answer. What to do, where to go, and how to survive? Change the events that lead to this, go to the past, gather a small, elite team of intellectual powerhouses with eidetic memories and give them the authority to guide the world down a path that will allow them to be prepared when the attack comes.

Better yet, they could avoid it altogether.

The enemy aren’t the only ones with agents in place. Sai, broken as he was by Ino’s death, is nothing if not a reliable agent. Shikamaru and Sakura are two of the only people alive who know the _reason_ for this war, this _invasion_ by an alliance of nations they’d never made contact with.

Obito and Madara’s Eye of the Moon Plan affected the entire _world_. That means more people than Shikamaru can imagine were caught in genjutsu with no warning, no ability to protect their minds or even prepare for it. But everyone in the world has chakra to some degree, however they use it, whatever their culture calls it. Everyone has the potential, and shinobi aren’t the only people who have nurtured it.

Someone recognized the Eternal Tsukuyomi as man-made. It’s only natural someone would investigate. Agents were to other continents until they found the cause. In the process of that, finding out an entire continent with highly-trained, chakra-wielding militaries was forming an alliance of unprecedented scale would frighten anyone. The International Coalition, already four countries strong, offered their services, made their own alliances with the continents nearest their own lands. Now the Intercontinental Coalition, they are a force of unimaginable scale and almost unlimited manpower. The warriors and magicians from each land spread their arts farther every day, freely sharing knowledge in a manner unheard of among shinobi, and every one of those being trained has their sights set on the destruction of the countries and Villages Shikamaru has worked so hard to unify and protect.

The fight is almost over. If most of his friends weren’t dead, Shikamaru would admire their efficiency, sympathize with the desire to destroy a threat to your home before it has a chance to come too close. It’s what he would do--what he has done, several times and on much smaller scales.

Sakura tugs on his arm, finger tapping twice on the back of his hand before she lets go. _Love you_ , that gesture says, as much as, _pay attention_. “We... have to go. We have to do it now. Or we’ll run out of time. Gaara promised us a week before he levels Loran.”

It’s been five days. In two more Gaara will flatten what’s left of the city of towers and erect a new Village, twice as large as Sunagakure but underground. It won’t be long after that before the Union begins moving civilians from the scattered refugee camps and Suna alike. All available lower-ranked shinobi will be brought here as well to help protect and hide them. It’s the back-up plan to the back-up plan, dreamt up by Shikamaru, Sai, and the granddaughter of the queen who took her people from their city; barriers around barriers will be created to keep the Ley Lines undisturbed and undiscovered.

It is the best hope of their culture’s survival, should Shikamaru and Sakura fail.

Shikamaru leans over the carved stone and kunai between them and kisses his wife’s forehead, right on the Byakugou she's famed for. Steady, deliberate, he tells her, “It's going to be alright. We’ve been over the plan a hundred times. I’ve accounted for _everything_ I possibly can.”

“If this doesn’t work,” Sakura murmurs, closing her eyes and sitting upright. “I want you to know I won’t regret dying beside you.”

“You too.” Settling back on his rear, leg folded under him, Shikamaru puts his hands together and molds his chakra as Sakura does the same. They make three seals, memorized days ago and practiced over and over again to get the timing right. _Horse, Monkey, Reverse Ram_ \--

Eyes catching, Shikamaru and Sakura shift forward and slam their hands down at each cardinal direction in a synchronized motion. Their hands are angled inwards, hitting elementally-designated spots with sustained, precisely matched chakra outputs of four different natures. It’s complicated, taxing, and difficult. Anyone with less control than Sakura has naturally and Shikamaru trained himself into by sheer necessity might not be able to balance their chakra enough to stabilize the changes made to the formula.

But they’ve _got this_. Sakura channels water-nature chakra to her left hand, placed firmly North, Yang in her right to the East in place of Wood Release. Shikamaru focuses Yin Chakra in his left hand on the western side to countervail that, in place of the metal element. Unformed fire-nature chakra gathers in his hand to the south. It’s a circle, a cycle, and though imperfect every piece of the seal they’ve written out has been designed with this method in mind. Sakura and Kakashi both reviewed it, tweaked it to the best of their ability. They worked feedback loops into what Jiraiya and the Fourth managed to create to increase the likelihood of safe transmission. It’s been a work in progress, this jutsu, ever since the possibility of time travel became known to Konohagakure thirty years ago, passed from Hokage to Hokage like so many other powers and responsibilities.

Now it’s Shikamaru’s, and like everything, he shares it with Sakura.

From the Sealing Array surrounding them, thin, lightning-fast flickers of purple light begin to rise. Shikamaru can feel the energy gathering below them, swelling beneath the stone floor. Wind rushes upwards, catching his coat and their hair, whipping Sakura’s skirt against her legs as it grows in intensity. The lines of the Seal alight all around them, shining blue, red, black, and white from each direction. Shikamaru can hear his coat shred behind him as it all intensifies, likely tearing away the black flames at the hem, but is more concerned with the way the lines and characters and curves of the massive Seal creep across the stone to their hands, pure chakra given form and direction flowing up their arms.

He and his wife stare at each other, Shikamaru feeling sick with fear but Sakura looking determined as he hasn’t seen her in years. Their bodies are absorbing the Fourth Hokage’s jutsu and Sakura’s modifications alike, different lines glowing different colors. Sakura’s Byakugou bursts into full being on her forehead, familiar black lines intersecting with the blue and white paths spreading over her cheeks to her temples, the bridge of her nose. He can feel the Yin seal on his left thigh burning as chakra pours out of it, feels the tug on his reserves as the jutsu stored there bursts into being, and Shikamaru shifts as Sakura does to get both knees under him.

She takes a breath, smiles at him as they both wrap their right hands around the Fourth Hokage’s Hiraishin kunai. They give a solid tug, Sakura admittedly doing most of the work, and as Shikamaru watches the steel begins to emerge from the stone. Then, abruptly--

The blade snaps. The rusty end of the blade is caught half inside the stone, and the rest of it is in their stacked hands.

Judging by the shocked looks on Sakura’s face, that wasn‘t supposed to happen.

“I really hope we don’t need that part!” she shouts.

For the first time in a year, maybe more, Shikamaru throws his head back and laughs. Gut-busting, shoulder shaking, tears-in-his-eyes laughter bursts out of his chest, and Sakura just shrugs, releases the knife handle, and pinches the flat sides of the rusty bit still stuck in the stone between her thumb and forefinger. She gives a mighty tug, Shikamaru laughing all the while, and the carved stone between them lights up fully, a blindingly bright confusion of colors. Chakra surges around them, through them--

It _explodes_ around them, and Shikamaru has just enough time to grabs his wife’s wrist before the lights devour them both.


End file.
